Carrie's Story: An Erotic S/M Novel (11 page)

He made an exasperated sound. I could see, out of
the corner of my eye, that he was simultaneously annoyed,
amused, and, despite himself, finding this a big turn-on.
"Helluva performance, Kate," he said, dryly, "but is there a
bottom line here? Is it a go or not?"

"Damn it," she said, angry but apparently amused as
well. "I'm giving you a whole lot more than a performance.
I'm giving you expert advice, which would be costing anybody but my oldest friend and lover a thousand bucks. So
let me continue, please, too bad for you if I insist on throwing in a lecture. Yes, there is a bottom line here, what a silly
term under the circumstances. Yes, somebody will quite
probably pay good money for a very badly trained little
girl with some evident talent and a pretty body. Not a huge
amount of money, but she'll squeak through the trials, and
somebody will get a bargain at the auction. Let's hope it's
somebody tough and professional, which is what she desperately needs. Still, it's not the way I like to do business,
and it's not the way I like to see business done. Why all the
rush? Why not train her properly? Why not really develop
a product? Send her to me if you're too bored and lazy to do it correctly. Do her good to get out of this misty Wuthering
Heights you've got here, anyway. And she'd be no trouble,
would you, Carrie?"

I didn't think Jonathan would like it, but I couldn't see
promising Ms. Clarke that I'd make trouble for her, even
hypothetically. "No, Ms. Clarke," I said.

She laughed again. "In fact," she continued thoughtfully,
"Carrie would like to come and stay awhile with me, I think.
Not that we-or I, at least-care what she'd like. But I think
she's becoming somewhat infatuated with me."

"Bitch," he said evenly. "Well, I'll think about it."

"No, you won't," she answered. "You'll never send her,
so don't pretend you will. You will continue in the confused,
romantic, amateurish way you've begun, and I will continue
to disapprove. At least, though, promise me you'll send her
for some yoga or ballet classes. I can see that she's a little jock,
but she could really use the strength and flexibility."

She picked up her purse and checked her perfect image
in the mirror. Then she put her arms around him and kissed
him. It was a long, communicative kiss, seeming to express
things I couldn't even guess at.

"Listen, sweetie," she murmured, "I'm sorry I teased
you, but you make it so damn easy. God, I miss you, though.
I wish we saw each other more often. Even if you won't bring
Carrie, you should come to Napa more than twice a year. It's
not so far, you know." Her hands, with those perfect fingernails, were all over his ass. He sighed, and they nuzzled a little
more. Then they drifted out of the room, arm in arm.

I stood there on the stool, a few tears trickling down my
cheeks, waves of shame, fear, and confusion washing over me.
I could think of so many things to cry about, I wasn't even sure what was really making me cry. Somebody had betrayed
somebody, I thought, but I didn't quite know what I meant by
it and who I thought had betrayed whom. I heard her car pull
away, and then, about five minutes later, Mrs. Branden came
into the study to tell me that Jonathan said I should go home
for today.

The next time I came was different, too. Mrs. Branden told
me to keep my clothes on-messenger clothes, that day my
T-shirt said, WE'RE PRIlVIUS-WE SUCK-and just to go into
the study. Jonathan was standing at a large walnut table by
the leaded window in the corner, making neat piles of papers.
There was a pot of coffee.

"There you are, good. Listen, this is a terrible pain, but
we need to do it together. These are ownership papers, these
are auction applications, these are photocopies of the laws that
these papers ever so elegantly skate over, so that we can actually be doing this in this day and age. Read everything, then
you can ask me questions. Then we can fill them out. Have
some coffee. No rules today. I've ordered a pizza and Cokes."

I went back to the kitchen to get my reading glasses -
first time I'd ever needed them here-then grabbed a pile of
papers, curled up in Jonathan's armchair, and started to read.
After a while a pattern emerged.

"It's another virtual reality, isn't it?" I asked, reaching
for a slice of the pizza, which had arrived by then.

"Pretty much," he nodded. "There's no real ownership-I mean, how could there be? Just elaborately precise
degrees of consensuality and gift giving within the boundaries
of international law. Still, the lawyers who wrote these papers
were rather talented pornographers and, within the defini tions of consensuality, managed to make it sound as though
this were the aaciezz regizne and the c)roit dzz ieigzzenr were still a
going thing."

"So it's completely legal? And how do they keep it so
secret?"

"Probably it could be challenged in court at certain
points. But it isn't, and probably for the same reasons that
we don't get reporters sniffing around. Most of the people
involved in this thing are rich, and some of them are spectacularly, metaphysically rich. I wouldn't exactly say a fix is
in, but there is influence at play and payoffs can always be
made."

"Swell," I said grimly, "just the crowd I want to hang
with. This isn't the part I like to think about, you know."

"I know," he said. "Neither do I. That's part of what Kate
means about my being a romantic amateur. She never forgets
the bigger picture for a minute."

"So, who is she?" I asked, wiping my mouth. I didn't
think he'd really tell me, but I liked to see how far I could go
during these little time-out periods when the rules were suspended. And, more than just about anything, I wanted to hear
about Ms. Clarke. I could see him start to say that it was none
of my business. But instead he took a deep breath.

"Kate? Yes, well. Um. Well, as she said, she's my oldest
friend and lover. I mean, we grew up together, our parents
were friends, we grew up playing sports and playing doctor.
I'm a year older and Kate is about a decade tougher. I honestly can't remember a time when I wasn't sexually involved
with Kate, if just at the level of peeking and groping. And
then a whole lot of early teenage experimentation. First just
screwing, hours and hours of it, but then we discovered pain, and power. Domination, control. Together, I mean we
just sort of stumbled into it, maybe because being so close
made us so brave and foolhardy. Or maybe, really, it all
came about because Kate was gutsy enough to demand what
she wanted, in so tough a voice that it scared us both, and
started us thinking about a whole other level of desire and
expression. Whatever it was, when we got started-God, it
was like two teenage science prodigies setting up a lab in
the basement. And practically blowing up the house. We did
some ridiculous and dangerous things. I've got scars. I guess
you've seen them."

"Yes," I said wistfully, just about dying of awe and envy,
"I have. Uh, who's, who's...?" I found myself asking the question, but then I couldn't get the words out.

But he was amazingly forthcoming. "The top, you mean?
Well, me, for starters, of course. I mean, we read Story of O,
too. But then we read a lot of other stuff, we tried lots of
stuff straight out of the books. Vezzzz,i is Furi, naturally. Even
Bataille, though we really didn't get more than sticky with
eggs and milk. We played from lots of angles, lots of roles.
All in all, it was pretty polymorphous-perverse, and it still is,
which I guess is what you really want to know about. I mean,
we don't use hardware at all anymore. It's more like that joke
about the prison, where the prisoners know all the jokes so
well that they just call them out by number and everybody
laughs. Kate and I know so many of the same scenes, and we
know each other so well, we can run lots of different and contrasting scenes very economically in a short time, just out of
fucking and eye contact."

She dumped him, he said, just before his senior year
in high school. He was stunned. He had thought they'd be together forever. "Together how?" she'd asked. "With our
parents buying us the big spread down the road? Oivnii:g
things together? Uh-uh, sweetie." It took him awhile to figure
it out, but it wasn't quite so terrible when he realized that they
could still fuck from time to time.

"And then, when I was at college, I got to go to a slave
auction, for the first time. Uncle Harry took me. And there,
on one of the little pedestals, was Kate. She was supposed
to be at Sarah Lawrence, but she'd somehow engineered
this stunt. Her parents found out afterward, and there was
a big stink, but it was too late then. She was a sensation, of
course, brought in more money than anybody had before. She
got famous in those circles, wound up running a remarkable
establishment in Napa with maybe the most gorgeous slaves
in the world."

"She's the one with the poker games, right?" I said. "I
would like to see it sometime, you know," I added.

"Forget it," he answered quickly, and rather grimly. "I've
changed my mind about that one."

I was surprised. I guessed I had overstepped some
mysterious boundary. He looked a little frightening. He lit
a cigarette, and I hugged my knees to my chest in the big
armchair. We both were quiet for a while. Then I almost
whispered, "Jonathan, am I really so badly trained?"

"That's a tough one," he said. "Yes, I guess so, I guess
by Kate's standards you are, but Kate's standards are astronomical. For God's sake, a lot of this is sensibility, after all.
And anyhow, there are different standards, different games,
different coordinates for plotting reality. I, for example... oh
come on, Carrie, if we can talk about Kate we can talk about this-don't play dumb. You know very well what I'm talking
about, even if we've never talked about it before.

"The game we play is objectification, right? You are
what I want you to be, or you get thrashed, as you well
know. Of course, we both know that there's got to be a you'
to actively `be' what I want you to be. But there's no simple
reversal. There's something I can only call originality, your
jagged little edge of critical intelligence that could go home
and turn this all into a story and write it down. It obliterates itself at my command and then what's weird is that I feel
as though I'm compelled to search for its trace. The story is
written somewhere under its erasure, maybe. Or something
like that, like something out of that god-awful fancy frog
theory you read so much of at school. Ridiculous, obscure,
pretentious, but still ...it seems to describe something that's
really happening. Something about the ass-backward way,
excuse the expression, in which we-all of us-feel and perceive and communicate. I mean, here I am, not even letting
you speak most of the time but still straining to hear it, that
calculating, deadpan, cranky, comic narrative little voice
saying, `And thezz Jonathan said...' and making me sound, oh
quite sexy, but just a little ridiculous and full of myself too.
Anyhow, that's what interests me. It's pretty elusive."

"Gosh," I said. It was about all I could think of to say.
"I didn't know you thought about stuff like that," I added.
I was pretty blown away. I certainly hadn't been playing
dumb. I had genuinely beezz dumb. I had been playing so hard,
so sincerely (his word), that I seemed to have missed a whole
level of the game.

"I know," he said. "You wouldn't. You're not quite openminded enough to expect stuff like that from somebody as boozhie and mainstream as I am. Still, I try. I read a lot. I
read what I think I need to read to understand what I want
to understand. It doesn't match your "Masterpiece Theatre"
image of me, but there it is."

"I've got to think about this some more," I said slowly.

"That's exactly right," he said. "You do. You're a kid,
after all, and sometimes I forget that. Sorry. Really, I mean
that. You know a lot more than you think you know, and I
know you think about it a whole lot, but you haven't really
thought it through. After all, it's a shocker, and a blow to the
ego, to consider that sex might be as difficult and complicated
as literature."

I was beginning to wonder if these seemingly ruleless sessions were where he scored his biggest points off me. Perhaps
the rest of the arrangement he and I had wouldn't work without these talks.

"It's getting late," he said. "We should get back to
work."

"No," I said. "Because even though this is important
stuff, you haven't really answered my question. Am I so badly
trained that I'll be in big trouble out there, wherever it is?"

"Now that'; disingenuous," he said. "You know there's
no answer to that question. I'm not training you for `out
there.' Even up to the last day, I'm training you for me, and
don't you forget that. Of course you're going to wonder about
out there,' but really, you'll just have to wait and see, won't
you? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be paying attention to
some technical things. Kate's right about ballet and yoga and
so forth, you can start going next week." He handed me some
more of those little business cards. "And I think you should
quit your job and move in here. The auction is in six weeks. Let's finish these papers. But first, I have a question for you.
What are Primus?"

The next weeks were tough and scary, as you can imagine.
No more palling around over pizza, and it about broke my
heart to pack up and say good-bye to Stuart. Still, it was clear
that if I was going to do this thing, I'd have to stop being a
part-timer.

And anyhow, all of a sudden Stuart was hardly ever
home. Because Stuart was in love. So he was at Greg's
house, or at the library studying across the table from Greg,
or maybe he and Greg were working on an AIDS crisis line
somewhere, or just sitting on the couch holding hands-all
that good stuff, I thought, and felt a twinge of loneliness,
as I rang Jonathan's kitchen doorbell, carrying only a small
suitcase and a backpack with a few books in it and my huge
desire to find out what would happen next.